Last winter, we were buried under about ten feet of powder. My teenage daughter had snowdays week after week, and it was pretty much impossible to go anywhere. Work slowed down as New England waited to thaw out. Even though my office is right upstairs, most of my clients were having a very hard time getting to theirs, and there wasn't much going on.
So, while my husband was busy shoveling, my daughter and I did what any self-respecting digital cable subscribers would do. We binged on Netflix.
For months, my daughter had been trying to turn me on to How I Met Your Mother. Being housebound gave us the perfect chance to watch it together. 9 seasons, 208 episodes, 20 minutes each (without commercial interruption).
You do the math. (Yikes.)
This wasn't my first binge. I've been known to devour all 6 hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice in a single, heavenly, afternoon. And, sometimes, I have to binge in order to review a new show for my regular column in Women's Voices for Change, like Grace and Frankie, House of Cards, and my favorite Orange is the New Black. At one point, I even wrote a primer on binging for other would-be couch potatoes.
But, binging still feels like a very guilty pleasure to me. Not so for my daughter (who can't remember a time before on-demand TV, much less DVDs or VHS tapes); it's par for the course. Why stop your life for a particular time on a particular night to watch a particular episode, when you can watch any and every episode, anytime, any place and on any device.
I mean, really, adhering to a network line-up is so last century.
While I may be a dilettante, my daughter is a committed binger. Thanks to Netflix (which she can see on our TV, on her laptop, on our iPad, and on her phone), she has relished season after season of series after series.
How she continues to get good grades is beyond me.
Nevertheless, here are some of her best binges:
Gossip Girl
Suffice it to say, this is not the New York I grew up in! It's a show about the 2% and their teen children — who have better-looking homes, hair, outfits, and boyfriends than the rest of us.
The Office
Not quite sure what the allure was here. My daughter has never worked in an office and has rarely even been in one. (Plus, that handheld camera thing always makes me a little queasy.) But she stayed with it.
One Tree Hill
Between the love affairs, terminal illnesses, basketball rivalries, and hostage situations (seasons 3 and 6), who would ever want to live in this place? All they need is a guest appearance by Susan Lucci. Can you say s-o-a-p o-p-e-r-a?
Pretty Little Liars
Another town you would be well-advised to steer clear of. A group of high school girls have more on their plates than homework and SATs. Like murder, blackmail, secrets, queen bees, and the mysterious "A."
Grey's Anatomy
An ensemble cast portrays young doctors at a busy hospital. It has great actors and good writing, and it somehow feels more "real" than any of the above. I walked by the TV the other afternoon and a patient's artery exploded all over his attending medical student. Niiiiiiice.
My daughter's still working her way through Grey's. But, I may ask her to hit pause and watch something with me instead. Pretty much any season of Downton Abbey (5 years, 43 episodes, on Amazon Prime) will do.
After all, we have another snowstorm on its way this weekend.
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One of the really nice things about coming from New York is that you don't have to look very far to find movies and TV shows that feature your very own hometown. There's Blue Bloods, Girls, Elementary, How I Met Your Mother, Ugly Betty, 30 Rock, CSI: NY and, of course, Sex and the City. The Good Wife is supposed to be set in Chicago, but it's filmed in New York, and if you think about it, Washington's Embassy Row in Madam Secretary looks just like Manhattan's Riverside Drive.
Oh wait ... it is Manhattan's Riverside Drive.
Whenever I'm homesick, all I have to do is find You've Got Mail on cable or pull out my well-worn DVD. Meg Ryan's adorable "Shop Around the Corner" is quite literally around the corner from where I grew up. The whole movie is pretty much a love poem to my neighborhood (not surprising, it was Nora Ephron's 'hood too). I may live in New England, but I'm still an Upper Westsider.
Maybe that's why I don't get Gossip Girl.
Maybe you have to be from the East Side.
In the last two weeks, we've had four snow days (the first and only snow days of the year — so far at least). Once she slept in until 11, once her homework was (halfheartedly) done, once she and a neighbor and the neighbor's little brother went sledding, my daughter was b-o-r-e-d. Bored. Luckily, despite snowmageddon rounds one and two, we never lost power or cable service or WiFi. My high honors high school student — who has been exposed to fine art and world-class culture since, well, birth — did what any red-blooded American teen would do.
She binged on Netflix.
Did she watch documentaries? The Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice? Downton Abbey? The BBC's Little Dorrit? Of course not. She watched back-to-back (to-back-to-back) episodes of Gossip Girl.
Here's where I came in. I was getting some cabin fever of my own. Although most of my clients were working through the blizzards, it was fairly quiet. The Y was closed and the lack of sidewalks and 8-foot snow piles at every intersection kept me from my usual walks. So, I decided to settle in and watch with her.
"Hey, Upper Eastsiders," saluted the anonymous and oh-so-snarky eponymous narrator at the beginning of the show. She then proceeded to air all the dirty laundry of Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf and assorted other prep school pretties with preposterous names. Apparently Manhattan's elite high schoolers party very hard, wear multiple designer outfits each day and live in absolutely palatial apartments on Park Avenue. (Except for one artsy family that lives in a funky, though equally palatial, loft in Brooklyn.) There are affairs and intrigues and eating disorders. The mothers (all of whom look considerably younger than I do) veer toward the frowsy and slightly inebriated. Then again, they aren't the main event. Their kids are. They own Manhattan.
Just like we did back in 1979, right?
Um ... not!
I went to high school on Park Avenue myself, but my experience couldn't have been farther from that of Serena and Blair. We were a school full of brainy kids, and accordingly most of us were, shall we say, fashion-challenged. No designer outfits (except, naturally, my Calvin Klein jeans). No outrageous parties. No last minute trips to Rio with a new boyfriend. We did homework, and went to the library and violin lessons and play rehearsals, and babysat on the weekends so we'd have pocket money.
It makes me wonder if today's teen audience thinks that there are really people living the Gossip Girl life. Not many, I'd tell them. Not many, if any.
Then again, people still ask me if living in NYC is like Seinfeld or, worse, The Real Housewives. No. It's not. And growing up there wasn't like The Carrie Diaries either.
Maybe someday I'll write a TV series about what it was really like.
Then again, I don't think it would do very well on Netflix.
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Snow days. They're a fact of life here in New England. Each year, when we receive the official calendar for our school district, it includes multiple "Last Day" dates. "Last Day with no snow days," "Last Day with 1 snow day," "Last day with 2 ..." All the way to five potential snow days. At that point, we would be well into July and they stop counting.
Long gone are the days when you watched the local news and followed the crawl along the bottom of your screen to see if your school was closed. Instead, we have automated telephony broadcasts. With our contact numbers in the system, we get prerecorded calls alerting us to any schedule changes.
This week, with "snowmageddon" on the way, we received not one or two or even three calls, but exponentially more. It was entertaining actually. First the house phone would ring, then my office phone, then my husband's cell, then mine. And this happened multiple times. With the storm pending, they cancelled after-school activities Monday. Then school itself Tuesday. Then school, again, Wednesday. Meanwhile, the town called, using the same effective if rather redundant system to tell us that there was a parking ban and a driving ban, that we needed to keep the roads clear so plows could plow and emergency vehicles could get through.
Well, duh.
Sure enough, the snow came down overnight and we woke to a winter wonderland. Although we had slightly fewer inches than predicted (a mere 22 at last count), the winds had been tremendous, creating massive drifts around our house, up on our porch and completely covering our cars.
Since I work from a home office and — miracle of miracles — there was no power of WiFi outage, it was pretty much business as usual for me.
For my teen daughter? Well, she did what teens do best. She slept in.
Once she was up and about, the day progressed fairly quietly. The storm continued. I had some ad copy due and some conference calls ("How much did you get?"). My husband shoveled, carving narrow paths through piles of snow so we could reach the street. My daughter watched back-to-back Gossip Girls while staying in constant contact with her BFFs via her iPhone. We all had leftover Chinese.
Mid-afternoon, feeling more than a little cabin feverish, we ventured forth, my daughter taking a sled and a couple of friends to the hill behind a nearby elementary school, my husband and I walking down to the harbor. Thirty-foot waves broke over one of the harborside restaurants, which nevertheless stayed open serving "chowdah," "lobstah," rum and beer to stalwart locals.
Nice to know that the town has its priorities straight.
Back home, with a fire roaring, we eventually settled in and watched Downton Abbey. It occurred to me, as we sat under an enormous fleece blanket, that this is what New England families have been doing for centuries. Weathering storms together.
Except, of course, for the wide screen TV and the on-demand entertainment, the WiFi, the mobile phones and iPad, the microwave popcorn and the Keurig coffee machine.
Otherwise, it's exactly the same.
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.
